Seaside Moors any groove to make you move,

part one of many dreamscapes -- these characters are dreaming!

if anything could be said of valravn, it was that he was adaptable.

he and his sister had more miles under his belt than any other child his age. they had seen shores of immeasurable distance, their lives had intersected by sheer fate with great forces -- and now, both he and @Regin slept and nursed by @Rosalyn's side.

already the memory of his birth mother was fading. already, images of sugar glider were gradually transforming into images of rosalyn. in a week or two, the whelp would completely forget the hardship of his trek, the stern face of his biological mother. in a month, he would never know rosalyn was not his true dam.

for now, he slept.

valravn was a good child in many ways. he was quiet. he was agreeable (unless you were trying to wake him up!). he was easily jostled aside by regin if she was hungry, and he was often seen trying to snuggle for warmth with either 'sibling' (@Chacal was not even a week old yet, and somehow valravn knew to treat the newborn as if she were made of the most fragile leaf).

he was deep in slumber, his mouth soft and eyes rapidly moving beneath heavily weighted eyelids.

he was dreaming -- not of his current life, or even a past life -- but of a place; a place his heart knew as intimately as his soul knew the womb and the grave -- a place that for every life he had lived, he had never forgotten.

a place lit by sunfire, edged by a silvery lake in the shape of a fading crescent moon. a place where plateaus rose in sheer columns alongside the glittering water, and the powerful chorus of swampsong overrode the gentle melody of wandering winds.

a place where he had lived and died once, again and again -- only this time, in this dream, he was valravn. he was himself; small and rotund and dark, not some pelagic monster, not some ancient leviathan, but his current form.

and there was another form too -- intangible, but present. aurous but edged in ridges of mercury -- a fluttering shape at once intimate and too far away for discernment. valravn gasped and fumbled after it, while the faerie light flit away like the dancing lanterns of cocytus' deceased, luring him deeper and deeper into the labrythine dark.

it was the first dream he would remember when the groanings of the conscious world at last stole him away.